by John Jakes
On a Wednesday, the second-to-last day of the month, Orry and Madeline said good-bye on the front porch of the farmhouse. The weather was appropriate to the occasion. To the northwest, onyx clouds tumbled and spun, speeding over the gutted land through a strange pearly sky. The wind picked up. The first spatters struck the dust of the dooryard. Orry could hardly think of all he must say in a short time.
“—once you’re in Washington, use some of the greenbacks to telegraph Brett.”
“Yes, we’ve gone over that, darling. Several times. Boz will see me safely to one of the Potomac bridges—I’ll be fine.” She touched his face. “Somehow you must send me news about yourself. I’ll worry constantly. At least you haven’t said anything more about that mad idea of field duty.”
“Because I’ve done nothing about it. There never seems to be time.” There was deliberate deceit in the answer, the words chosen and arranged to allay her fear. He hoped she didn’t see through the trick. He added quickly, “I’ll send a letter by courier when I can.”
She came closer, strands of wind-loosened hair blowing around her strangely sad little traveling hat—a sort of cap with a single black-dyed aigrette, which the wind bent and nearly broke. Tears filled her eyes.
“Do you know how much I’ll miss you? How much I love you? I know why you’re sending me away.”
“Because it’s unwise for you to stay in—”
“Thousands of other women are staying in Richmond,” she broke in. “That isn’t the reason—though I love you more than ever for pretending it is. You’ve been protecting me.” Dust blew around them; the landscape whited out in the glitter of lightning. “Your superiors believe Ashton’s accusation. Don’t bother denying it; I know it’s true. A War Department official married to a Negress—that’s intolerable. So I must be gotten rid of. Except for missing you so terribly, I’m not especially sad to leave. I’ve never been happy as a lady-in-waiting at a court of bigots.”
She gave him a quick, intense kiss. “But I do love you for trying to spare me the truth.”
The clouds burst, the rain roared down. Tall and bleak as some Jeremiah, he glowered at her. “Who told you?”
“Mr. Benjamin, when I chanced to meet him on Main Street day before yesterday.”
“That slimy, dishonorable—”
“He didn’t say a word, Orry.”
“Then how—?”
“He cut me dead. Saw me coming and crossed the street to avoid me. Suddenly I understood everything.”
He flung his arm around her, wracked by wrath and sorrow. “God, how I hate this damn war and what it’s done to us.”
“Don’t let it do anything worse. To give your life now would be squandering it for nothing.”
“I’ll be careful. You, too—promise me?”
“Of course.” Shining confidence returned to her face as they huddled on the porch, which had grown dark. “I know we’ll come through this and be back together at Mont Royal sooner than either of us expects.”
“So do I.” He eyed the rain beating on the great raw stumps of the vanished trees. “I must go.”
“I’ll wait until it lets up a little.”
“Yes, good idea—” He was wasting time on commonplaces. He swept his arm around her again and kissed her for nearly half a minute, with passion. “I love you, my Annabel Lee.”
“I love you, Orry. We’ll come through.”
“I am sure of it,” he said, smiling for the first time.
She stayed on the porch until the falling rain hid the buggy on the road.
On the return trip, Orry started sneezing. By the time he reached the city at noon the next day, his head felt light. Madeline’s absence created a gloom in the silent rooms on Marshall Street. As he changed into his uniform to return to the department, he vowed to spend as little time as possible in the flat. He would immerse himself in work till a transfer came through. He could even sleep on one of the office couches if he chose.
It might be wise to do that for the first night or two. He missed Madeline fiercely, and there were too many memories here. Seddon wouldn’t object if he stayed in the building. After all, he had proved himself a model bureaucrat by disposing of the troublesome Negress.
God, the bitterness. He couldn’t help it. He no longer had the slightest wish to fight or die for any of the bankrupt principles of Mr. Jefferson Davis. He could hardly believe that just three years earlier he had been willing. Joining Pickett was not a matter of patriotism, but of survival. He was answering the drum, as he had when he went to West Point and soldiered in Mexico, because of the drumbeat, not the rhetoric of the drummer. I’d damn near fight for the Yankees to get out of this town, he thought as he left the flat.
He had been at work less than ten minutes when a sound made him look up. Foot scraping, Josea Pilbeam struggled to Orry’s desk and whispered, “I must see you at once. It’s urgent.”
On a staircase heavy with darkness and humidity in the aftermath of the storm, Pilbeam said, “Last night the lady and her spouse left the city for nearly four hours.”
“Where did they go?”
“To that location you described. They conferred with a heavy-set man I’ve never seen before.”
They were using the farm again. Patience had been repaid. He would show Seddon, Benjamin, the lot of them that he was no lunatic. Excited, he said, “Did you hear the man’s name?”
Pilbeam shook his head. “No one used it while I was listening.”
“Where exactly did they meet?”
“In the building right at the edge of the bluff. After about a quarter of an hour, they were joined by someone I did recognize. He’s been in our office many times.”
Orry put a handkerchief to his dripping nose, suppressed a sneeze. “Who was it?”
The marble walls and steps seemed to rumble and quake when Pilbeam said, “Winder’s plug-ugly. Israel Quincy.”
111
SO INFERNALLY SIMPLE, ORRY thought as he slipped across the field, following the same route he had taken the first time. Ever since his conversation with Pilbeam, he had marveled at the beauty of the obvious—effective because it was almost always overlooked. The investigator from Winder’s office had found no evidence of a plot because he was part of it.
The evening was moonless and still. Orry’s broadcloth felt heavy with dampness; his shirt was already soaked through. Halfway to the implement building, he paused to survey the field by the fitful pulses of red light accompanying the federal bombardment to the south.
The earth around him had lately been subjected to digging and trampling. He cast his mind back. His first night here, he remembered, the field was weedy. Then he had ridden out a second time and discovered—
What? He cudgeled his tired mind while sniffing through his dripping nose. He choked off an unexpected sneeze with both hands clapped over his face. He distinctly remembered plowed soil on his second visit. Curious that someone would work the field of an abandoned—
“Stupid. Stupid!” The obvious again, and he had missed it. He knew how the Whitworth rifles and ammunition had disappeared. They had been hidden right under everyone’s nose.
“Feet,” he corrected in a whisper. The trick came straight from Edgar Poe’s famous detective tale of the stolen letter. As a Poe fancier, he was doubly humiliated. And I’ll wager Mr. Quincy took charge of inspecting this part of the farm. Mr. Quincy strolled over the newly plowed field and noticed nothing unusual.
Had Powell himself hidden somewhere on the property all the time? With Quincy involved, it was certainly possible. Orry rubbed his nose with his damp handkerchief while red light ran around the southern horizon and the artillery storm muttered again. He put the handkerchief away, reached across beneath his coat, and drew the navy Colt from the bulky holster tied to his left leg. He pulled the hammer back to half-cock and resumed his cautious advance.
He approached the same light crack through which he had spied before. When close to the building, he discerned a buggy
and two saddle horses near the main house. He pressed his cheek to the wood and bit down on his lower lip in a flash of rage. There, perched on one of the dirt-covered Whitworth crates resurrected from the field, James Huntoon.
Gaps showed between the buttons of Huntoon’s bulging waistcoat. He had removed his outer coat, rolled up his sleeves, and was holding a large piece of paper by the edges. Some sort of plan or diagram. He tilted it forward, resting it on his paunch so others could see it.
“May I have your attention?” someone else said. “This is the device Mr. Powell described before he was called away for a few days to attend to other details of our campaign.” Orry frowned; the speaker was out of his line of sight, but the voice was maddeningly familiar.
He knelt to change position and his angle of vision. Beside Huntoon on the rifle case he now saw a bright lantern. To the right of that, lounging against a beam and picking his teeth with a straw, the benign Mr. Quincy. Orry seethed.
He heard his sister’s voice next. “Are you sure it will work, Captain Bellingham?”
Bellingham? Had he found the man who had shown her the painting—?
“My dear Mrs. Huntoon, infernal devices invented by General Rains at the Torpedo Bureau have a notable success record.”
A corpulent man waddled into view. Only his back was visible, but something about the shape of his head tantalized Orry as much as his voice did. The man extended his right hand; Orry saw a large lump of coal in his palm. If this was indeed the Bellingham responsible for Madeline’s humiliation and flight, Orry was tempted to shoot him in the back.
Lifting his hand slightly to call attention to the coal, the man said, “A device similar to this was placed in the coal bunker of the captured blockade-runner Greyhound when she lay at anchor farther down the James. A stoker shoveled it into the boiler with his coal scoop, and if Ben Butler and Admiral Porter had been standing in slightly different locations when the device exploded, there would be two more Yankees in hell.”
Orry identified the voice. That is, he put a name to it—the right name—though he could hardly believe it. To the bubbling stew of his anger, the recognition added memories going all the way back to his first summer at the Academy; memories involving George and, later, Charles in Texas, when Charles wrote to express surprise and dismay at the unexplained vendetta of a senior officer of the Second Cavalry.
Israel Quincy made a sucking sound. “Sure is a fooler, Captain. Nobody could tell it from real coal.”
“Not unless they handled it.” He gave the device to Quincy, whose hands sagged beneath the weight. “Examine the casting. The shape, the texture, the perfect pigmentation of the iron—genius.”
That was the moment Orry saw the profile of the former Union officer who had somehow become involved in a Confederate conspiracy. To be positive, he scrutinized the three chins, the receding hair, the one small, dark eye visible to him. There was no doubt. He was looking at Elkanah Bent—alias Bellingham.
If Orry hadn’t seen Bent, made the identification, the rest might not have happened as it did; he might have crept away and ridden back to Richmond to turn out a full company of the provost’s men, before the Whitworths could be buried again. But the lifelong vendetta of Elkanah Bent of Ohio—a vendetta that had continued down to the present, with the revelation to Ashton—twisted some key in Orry’s head. A door that should have remained locked burst open.
There were just three men inside, but in his state of mind it wouldn’t have mattered had there been thirty. He stood and strode around the corner of the building. He had the navy Colt on full cock when he booted the door inward.
“Everyone stand still.”
Ashton clapped hands over her mouth. Huntoon dropped the diagram and slid sideways along the edge of the crate. As for Bent—no mistake as to who it was, none—his face was full of bewilderment that swiftly melted into terrified recognition.
“Orry Main—?”
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” said the calmly professional Quincy, shooting his right hand beneath his parson’s coat. Orry twisted toward him and fired. The bullet flung Quincy backward against the beam. Orry heard his head smack as he dragged out his pepperbox, trigger finger jerking and jerking even as he slid down to land on his rump. The barrels discharged one after another; the last shot blew off the toe of Quincy’s left boot as he toppled sideways.
Bent was juggling the coal bomb, shaking like a child caught with a stolen cookie. Orry saw Ashton warn her husband with her eyes. Attack him, or he’ll get us all. Cringing, Huntoon shook his head. The image was reflected in one of the dirty windows overlooking the river.
“Captain Bellingham, is it?” Orry said in a raw voice. “I sure as hell don’t know how you got here, but I know where you’re bound, you and your friends. You’re going to prison for plotting the murder of the President.”
Bent was recovering; his eyes had a sly look. Like Orry, he didn’t understand how the astonishing confrontation had come about. But he understood the potential consequences.
Huntoon pressed a fist into his groin and squealed. “Dear God—he knows. He knows everything!”
“So does Secretary Seddon,” Orry said, “and the President himself. They’ve been anxious to catch the culprits with the evidence. You’re done for, James. You, too, my dear, treacherous slut of a sist—”
Huntoon snatched the lantern by its bail and threw it.
Orry ducked. The lantern struck the siding behind him, shattering. Droplets of oil splattered the wall and dirt floor. Strewn pieces of straw began to smoke.
Orry had a swift impression of Huntoon passing him, Ashton dragging him by the hand like a child. He could give them no attention because Bent was rushing at him, raising the black iron casting with both hands. My God, he’ll blow us up—
Bent struck for the top of Orry’s head. Orry dodged; the casting raked his left temple. The only explosion was one of pain.
Bent smashed the casting against the outermost point of Orry’s left shoulder, the stump of his amputated arm. Orry dropped to one knee. Silent tears of pain ran down his cheeks. There was no mistaking Bent’s intention. The trapped animal would kill to escape.
“Bastard,” Bent gasped, hitting at Orry’s left ear with the casing and nearly knocking him over. Blood ran from a gash in Orry’s hair. He had trouble focusing his eyes. The surroundings brightened; he felt heat behind him. The building was afire.
“Arrogant—South Carolina bastard—” Again Bent raised the casting, turning it until he had a sharp point aimed at the top of Orry’s skull like some druid’s knife. “Waited years for this—”
The casting blurred down. Orry aimed the Colt and fired. The ball hit Bent’s left wrist, scattering little lumps of flesh and chips of bone. The wound made Bent cry out, jerk the casting to one side, and drop it. The casting grazed the stump of Orry’s arm and landed near the fire spreading in the littered straw.
Hatred was powering both men. In all his life, Orry had never felt it so intensely. Scenes clicked in and out of his head like card in a stereopticon. He saw himself walking an extra tour of guard duty, in a blizzard, thanks to Bent. He saw himself lying in the West Point surgery near death from exposure, courtesy of Bent. He saw the letter from Charles about the officer persecuting him, his sister’s face as she spoke of the portrait shown her by a Captain Bellingham—
He came up from his knee, reversing the Colt and leaving it uncocked. He clubbed Bent’s head with the base of the butt. Bent shrieked, staggered back.
Orry hit again. Bent’s nose squirted blood. He flung his right forearm over his face to protect it, then his left. Bits of flesh were caught in bloody, torn threads of his powder-burned sleeve. Curses poured unconsciously from Orry as he hit again. Bent staggered to the right. Orry hit again. Bent wobbled—
That’s enough; he’s through.
Above the crackle of flames, he heard traces jingling, wheels creaking, rapid hoofbeats. Huntoon and Ashton in flight. It didn’t matter. Only this doug
hy, cringing coward mattered—and Orry’s boundless rage, the reaction to years of Bent’s lunatic enmity and his discovery here among people who had driven Madeline away.
Bent continued to wobble. Take him prisoner; he can’t fight anymore. The faint inner voice inspired no response. Crazed as his adversary, Orry hit again.
“Ah-ha.” Bent’s hurt cry bore a bizarre resemblance to laughter. “Jesus, Main—Jesus Christ, have mercy—”
“When did you?” Orry screamed, driving his right knee into Bent’s genitals. Bent went backward, one staggering step, a second, a third—
Too late, Orry jumped to grab him. Bent’s back struck one of the windows. For an instant, hundreds of tiny fires burned in the flying fragments. Bent fell through the sawtoothed opening, one side of his face ripped by glass still in the frame. He screamed as he plummeted. Then Orry heard the pulpy thump of a body hitting something.
Hair in his eyes, Orry stuck his head out the window. Bent had grazed an outcrop, spun away, and was still falling. He smashed into another and then bounced like a ball of India rubber, flying out and down and landing in the water with a mighty splash. A bubbling commotion disturbed the river for a moment. Then—nothing.
Orry strained for some sight of Bent’s body, but it was gone, already swept underwater and downstream, toward the red lights pulsing on the wooded horizon.
A half-minute passed. Orry grew conscious of the heat and thickening smoke. A section of siding dissolved into fiery debris. Above him, flames ran along dry rafters. Burning straw was within inches of the coal bomb. Orry leaped and flung the bomb through the open doorway.
He wanted to pry open a crate and take two or three Whitworths for evidence. He barely had time to holster the Colt and snatch the diagram Huntoon had been holding—one corner was already smoking—and slip it into his pocket. Hunched over and struggling to breathe, he dragged Israel Quincy’s body toward the door.
One of the beams eaten by the flame disappeared. The rafter above him sagged, broke, and rained sparks and flaming splinters on him. He smelled his hair burning as he gasped and strained, finally pulling Quincy’s corpse into the open.